To ensure that retail merchandise stocked upon a shelf is suitably presented to a potential customer, the merchandise is typically “faced.” The process of facing often involves sliding the merchandise, which is typically situated upon the shelf in rows, toward a front edge of the shelf. When the merchandise is faced in this manner, the potential customer is presented with a neat, uniform, and aesthetically-pleasing display. In addition, the merchandise is best situated for viewing by the potential customer strolling down an aisle in the retail establishment and, as a result, leads to increased and/or optimized sales of the merchandise.
As business owners well know, facing is particularly important when the shelf carrying the merchandise is above or below a normal eye level of the potential customer. In these circumstances, the merchandise on the shelf is simply less noticeable and/or visible to the potential customer. If the merchandise is not properly faced and moved forward to the front of the shelf, the potential customer may not realize that the merchandise is available for purchase and, consequently, a potential sale of the merchandise is quickly lost. Therefore, the need to have the merchandise at or near the front edge of those less viewable shelves is desirable.
In the past and even today, employees were and still are burdened with the task of manually facing the merchandise arranged on the shelves. This is a time-consuming chore for the employees and one that must be performed frequently. In an attempt to relieve employees from having to continually face products, a number of different systems have been developed in recent years. These systems are designed to automatically move any remaining merchandise forward toward the front edge of the shelf as the potential customers remove items.
One of the automatic facing systems is known as a gravity feed system. The gravity feed system includes a planar surface tilted downwardly toward the front edge of the shelf. When the merchandise is placed on that downwardly canted surface, the merchandise is biased toward the front edge of the shelf due to the pull of gravity. Each time the foremost item of merchandise is removed from the system by a potential customer, gravity causes the remaining items to slide forward. While this system is suitable to move the merchandise closer to the potential customer, a considerable amount of valuable retail area or real estate is consumed by the tilted surface. In addition, due to gravity pulling downwardly on the entire row of merchandise, reinserting a single item is often difficult if the potential customer changes their mind after having removed that item from the gravity feed system.
As a supplement and/or an alternative to the gravity feed system, another of the automatic facing systems known as a pusher system is frequently employed. The pusher system relies on a spring to bias a paddle or pusher toward the front edge of the shelf. When a row of the merchandise is placed in front of the pusher, the spring drives the row ahead to the front edge of the shelf. In order to center the pusher behind the merchandise and to guide the pusher forward, a typical pusher system secures the pusher within a central track as shown in, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 6,889,854 to Burke. The central track is prone to be clogged with debris and then sticking or malfunctioning. As a result, the merchandise is not faced as expected.
In addition to the above, without the track the merchandise may be able to bend or bow any divider walls included in the pusher system outwardly. As a result, the merchandise is not held in a tight, linear arrangement on the shelf. Also, without the track the pusher may slip off the back of the rear item and, therefore, the merchandise is not faced as desired.
There exists, therefore, a need in the art for a pusher system that addresses one or more of the above-noted disadvantages of known facing systems. The invention provides such a system.